Why Catholic Schools Spell Success For America's Inner-CityChildren

It is said that economic empowerment today is linked
inextricably to education. This means that Congress has the
opportunity, over the next year, to give tens of thousands of
America's most disadvantaged children a much brighter future.
Attention from across the political and social spectrum is shifting
to the astonishing success of inner-city Catholic schools in
working with the very children the public schools have abandoned as
uneducable. An abundance of recent research comparing public,
private, and religious schools shows that Catholic schools improve
not only test scores and graduation rates for these children, but
also their future economic prospects-and at a substantially lower
cost.

The school choice1 measures now before Congress would
give parents the option to send their children to public, private,
or parochial schools of choice. Thanks to the growing body of
research supporting Catholic school education, Congress can be
certain that inner-city children would benefit from these measures.
This research looks at the impact of Catholic schools on a range of
outcomes such as grades, standardized test scores, dropout and
graduation rates, college attendance, and future wage gains.

In a study published in 1990, for example, the Rand Corporation
analyzed big-city high schools to determine how education for low
income minority youth could be improved.2 It looked at
13 public, private, and Catholic high schools in New York City that
attracted minority and disadvantaged youth. Of the Catholic school
students in these schools, 75 to 90 percent were black or Hispanic.
The study found that:

The Catholic high schools graduated 95 percent of their
students each year, while the public schools graduated slightly
more 50 percent of their senior class;

Over 66 percent of the Catholic school graduates
received the New York State Regents diploma to signify completion
of an academically demanding college preparatory curriculum, while
only about 5 percent of the public school students received this
distinction;

85 percent of the Catholic high school students took the
Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), compared with just 33 percent of
the public high school students;

The Catholic school students achieved an average combined SAT
score of 803, while the public school students' average combined
SAT score was 642; and

60 percent of the Catholic school black students scored above
the national average for black students on the SAT, and over 70
percent of public school black students scored below the same
national average.

M ore recent studies confirm these observations. As parents,
politicians, and concerned observers become aware of the benefits
of Catholic schooling, particularly for the poor, the rhetoric
demanding action builds. Syndicated columnist William Raspberry, a
self-described "Reluctant Convert to School Choice," wrote
recently, "It seems as obvious for poor children as for rich ones
that one-size-fits-all education doesn't make sense."3
Furthermore, according to a recent survey conducted by Terry Moe,
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and John Chubb, founding
partner and curriculum director for the Edison Project, a stunning
83 percent of public school parents and 82 percent of inner-city
poor parents want parochial schools to be included in the choice of
schools to which they can send their children.4

The Popularity of Private School
Choice

Lawmakers and educators should use the mounting research
comparing the performance of students in private and religious
schools with their public school counterparts to promote real
change in the U.S. educational system.

Thanks to the growing popularity of school choice,5
three legislative proposals now before Congress would give
inner-city low-income parents the opportunity to send their
children to the public, private, or parochial school of their
choice. These measures would empower parents to remove their
children from violent or failing schools and send them to
institutions in which they would be able to learn.

The District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act
of 1997, introduced by Representative Richard Armey (R-TX) and
Senators Dan Coats (R-IN), Joseph Lieberman, and Sam
Brownback (R-KS), would give some of the poorest students in the
nation's capital vouchers to attend the schools of their
choice.7

The Safe and Affordable Schools Act, introduced by
Senator Paul Coverdell (R-GA), includes school choice demonstration
projects for children who want to escape unsafe schools and
provisions to encourage states and localities to design their own
school choice programs.8

C ongress can use the strong and widespread data available on the
success of Catholic school education to strengthen and promote
proposals that would increase significantly the educational
opportunities and choices available to America's inner-city poor.

Why Choose Catholic Schools?

Not only do Catholic schools offer a safe and cooperative
learning environment, but they do so at a more reasonable and much
lower cost than the public schools.9 For example:

Holy Angels Elementary School, a 110-year-old
institution, is located in the Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood of
southside Chicago, Illinois, where three out of four people live in
poverty and violent crime is the rule rather than the exception.
Yet Holy Angels has managed to become one of the strongest academic
institutions in the country. According to a 1994 report published
by the Chicago Public Schools, four times as many Holy Angels 8th
graders scored above the national average in math on the Iowa Test
of Basic Skills than 8th graders attending the area's three public
schools. In addition, of the 8th graders who scored above the
national average in reading, twice as many were from Holy Angels as
from the public schools. Tuition at Holy Angels is approximately
$1,500 a year. 10

St. Gregory the Great Elementary School on West 90th
Street in New York City serves only low-income black children from
Harlem and Washington Heights. It outperforms all neighboring
public schools and most of the schools in its district. In 1995, 62
percent of St. Gregory's 3rd graders were reading above the minimum
standard, and 92 percent functioned above the standard in math. St.
Gregory charges only $1,700 a year in tuition.11

East Catholic High in Detroit, Michigan, where the
principals saved for 12 years just to buy a school bus, has not
allowed lack of funding to interfere with its students' academic
achievements. The school serves low-income minorities almost
exclusively and has been particularly successful in teaching
students who were not performing well in public schools. Nearly 75
percent of its students go to college after graduation, and only 15
percent of parents paying the $2,000 tuition fee are
Catholic.12

H oly Angels, St. Gregory the Great, and East Catholic High are
typical inner-city Catholic schools. They overcome financial
hardships daily to deliver astounding results because they possess
the ingredients that make schools work well: (1) strong
institutional leadership and school autonomy; (2) shared values
among the staff about school goals; (3) a safe and orderly
environment; and (4) core curriculum requirements and high
expectations for all students regardless of background.

Despite such examples of success, however, prejudice against
allowing inner-city parents to choose Catholic schools for their
children continues to linger among policymakers and the education
elite. It often seems that just mentioning the term "Catholic
schools" causes many opponents to conjure up images of medieval
nuns using knuckle-rapping rulers on terrified children. Unlike
many government-run schools, Catholic schools are strong on
discipline, but the wholesome discipline at a Catholic school sends
a clear message to students who consequently are able to learn in
the school's safe and orderly environment. Researchers have agreed
that the caring staff members at Catholic schools willingly devote
their attention to the academic and emotional well-being of
students.13

This difference is not lost on parents. In Cleveland, Ohio,
inner-city parents immediately enrolled their children in Catholic
schools during the Cleveland choice experiment,14 a
popular full choice program that recently was struck down by a
lower court after a successful first year of operation. Most of the
parents in this program who enrolled their children in the Catholic
schools were not Catholic. They selected Catholic schools because,
on balance, they deliver impressive results.

Opponents of school choice often state that Catholic schools
succeed because they can pick and choose students, they have more
freedom to dismiss disruptive students, and their parents are more
involved in their children's education. The evidence, however,
proves otherwise. According to Lydia Harris, principal of St.
Adalbert, a leading Catholic school in Cleveland, "There's no cream
on my crop until we put it there. It's a myth that we take
discipline problems and throw them out of school. It's the other
way around. I get the kids the public schools can't
handle."15 St. Adalbert is not alone. On average,
Catholic high schools dismiss fewer than two students per year, and
fewer than three students per year are suspended for any
reason.16

In 1996, Sol Stern, a contributing editor at New York's City
Journal, wrote about how Catholic schools worked to teach their
predominantly low-income minority non-Catholic
clientele.17 Stern concluded that "[Catholic schools
are] constantly reminding us that the neediest kids are educatable
and that spending extravagant sums of money isn't the answer. No
one who cares about reviving our failing public schools can afford
to ignore this inspiring laboratory of reform."18 This
is a strong admonition to those in Washington, D.C., who can direct
the future of education reform in the United States.

The success of these Catholic education "laboratories" has been
well researched, and that research deserves Congress's attention.
As John DiIulio, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
attests, "The Catholic-school story is as solid as you can make a
case.... It's not even close to the warning zone, when it comes to
sociological credibility." 19

Over 20 Years of Research: The
Positive Impact of Catholic Schools

Over the past several years, Cardinal John J. O'Connor
repeatedly has asked New York City to allow him to educate the
lowest-performing 5 percent of its public school students. But even
though Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responded positively, the city's
board of education chose not to accept the cardinal's offer.
Cardinal O'Connor may be speaking from personal conviction, but a
substantial body of professional research supports his assertion
that Catholic schools can do a better job of educating the
country's poorest and most disadvantaged children. In fact,
evidence that Catholic schooling benefits inner-city children has
been mounting since the early 1980s.20

General Characteristics of Catholic
Schools

In general, studies show that Catholic schools by design foster
the academic, religious, and moral development of their students.
These schools frequently are characterized by parents as exhibiting
a strong sense of community and as having an environment
characterized by high academic standards, discipline and order, and
a strongly committed and collegial faculty.21

Anthony Bryk of the University of Chicago Department of
Education, Valerie Lee of the University of Michigan School of
Education, and Peter Holland, the Superintendent of Schools in
Belmont, Massachusetts, compiled empirical evidence on Catholic
school organization and its effects for a study published in 1993.
They based their findings on extensive field visits to seven high
schools around the country that represented the diversity of
Catholic secondary education, and on an extensive analysis of data
collected for the U.S. Department of Education's comprehensive
study of high school seniors and sophomores, High School and
Beyond (HS&B).22 After studying the social and
intellectual history of these schools and coupling their findings
with information gathered by the National Catholic Educational
Association, the authors generalized their observations to the
Catholic school sector as a whole and found the following common
elements:

More internal diversity with regard to race and income than the
typical public school;

On average, an 88 percent acceptance rate for those who
apply;

Less specialized staff and less complex school organization
than in the large public secondary schools;

More advanced academic courses and fewer vocational courses,
with 72 percent of Catholic school students studying an academic
program and only 10 percent concentrating on vocational studies (in
public schools, children are distributed approximately equally
across the academic, advanced academic, and vocational
tracks);

A focused curriculum and high standards;

A principal with discretion in hiring and firing
staff;

A written code of conduct that includes a dress code, standards
for social behavior among students and faculty, and a list of
prohibited behaviors; and

A lower incidence of students' cutting class, refusing to obey
instructions, talking back to teachers, and instigating physical
attacks on teachers compared with public and other private
schools.23

Impact on Academic Achievement

The seminal work on Catholic school education and inner-city
children was conducted by the late James Coleman, a professor of
sociology at the University of Chicago. The results were widely
reported in 1981 after appearing in summary form in The Public
Interest.24
Using data from the ongoing National Longitudinal Sample collected
by the U.S. Department of Education,25 Coleman found
that Catholic schools not only helped children achieve
academically, but also provided a more integrated school setting
for students with a higher likelihood for dropping
out.26

In 1982, Coleman published High School Achievement: Public
and Private Schools with Thomas Hoffer of the National Opinion
Research Center27 and Sally Kilgore, senior fellow at
the Hudson Institute. The authors concluded that "Catholic schools,
in comparison to public schools, produced higher cognitive
achievement; that they were less racially segregated; and that
variation across students in patterns of achievement was much less
dependent upon family background."28 In analyzing
HS&B data, they found that Catholic school students-especially
minority students-scored significantly higher on standardized tests
even after controlling for differences in family
characteristics.

Catholic schools send a higher percentage of their students to
college than do public schools. For example, approximately 66
percent of the 1980 Catholic high school graduates had enrolled in
a four-year or two-year college before the spring of
1982,29 compared with fewer than 50 percent of the 1980
graduates of public schools.

Catholic schools also are more successful in preventing dropouts
than are the public schools. For example, while 13.1 percent of
white students drop out of public schools, only 2.6 drop out of
Catholic schools. The dropout rates for black and Hispanic students
in public schools are 17.2 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively,
while the dropout rates for these ethnic groups in Catholic schools
are 4.6 percent for blacks and 9.3 percent for Hispanics (see Chart
1).30 The differences in achievement between minority
and white students within each school are narrowed substantially in
Catholic schools in comparison with public schools. Subsequently,
Coleman concluded that Catholic schools are a better example of the
"common school" ideal of American education than today's public
schools.

Andrew Greeley, professor of social sciences at the University of
Chicago, and his associates conducted much of the research on the
outcomes of Catholic schools in a series of studies that began in
1966 with The Education of Catholic Americans and continued
into the 1980s. Their analysis of HS&B data showed superior
performance among whites, blacks, and Hispanics in Catholic schools
in every single category, including math, science, and vocabulary.
Greeley's Catholic High Schools and Minority Students,
published in 1982, claims that "not only was the achievement of
minority students in Catholic schools higher than that of minority
students in public schools, but that these differences were the
greatest for the most disadvantaged youth-those from poor families,
those whose parents had a limited education, and those enrolled in
nonacademic curricular programs."31

John Convey, a professor in the Department of Education at the
Catholic University of America, evaluated studies on Catholic
schools published between 1965 and 1991. He identified important
indicators of effectiveness and concluded that, among other things,
Catholic elementary and secondary school students, on average,
scored better on tests of academic achievement than public school
students. In Catholic Schools Make a Difference, Convey
reports that, in a series of studies based on National Assessment
of Educational Progress32 data, Catholic school students
received consistently higher scores than public school students and
that whites, blacks, and Hispanics received higher scores in
Catholic schools in every single category (reading, science, and
mathematics).

Recent Studies

The early studies comparing public and Catholic schools found
that children in Catholic schools outperform children in public
schools, but one of the main criticisms of these findings is that
they fail to account for the possibility of selection
bias.33 This bias, opponents contend, leaves public
schools with the low-performing students. Yet parochial schools
appear to be most beneficial for those who need a good education:
low-achieving, low-income, and inner-city minority students. Recent
research continues to support the previous findings while
attempting to control as accurately as possible for the occurrence
of selection bias.

In a study published in 1995, William N. Evans and Robert M.
Schwab of the University of Maryland School of Economics used two
measures to evaluate the relative effectiveness of public and
Catholic schools: the decision to finish high school and the
decision to start college.34 Using HS&B data and
paying particular attention to selection bias, the authors found
that attending a Catholic high school raised the probability of
finishing high school and entering college for inner-city children
by 17 percentage points. "This is twice as large as the effect of
moving from a one- to a two-parent family and two and one-half
times as large as the effect of raising parents' education from a
high school dropout to a college graduate," observed Evans and
Schwab. They also noted that Catholic schools have a particularly
strong effect on students with the lowest probability of
graduation-inner-city black pupils, students in urban areas, and
students with low test scores.

In 1996, William Sander, professor of economics at DePaul
University in Chicago, published the results of a study examining
the effect of a Catholic grade school education on the test scores
of whites, using data from HS&B.35 Sander found that
non-Catholics benefited the most from attending a Catholic grade
school-even more than Catholics themselves. Looking at the effects
of Catholic grade school education on 10th grade test scores and
controlling for selection bias, Sander found an improvement in
mathematics, reading, and vocabulary test scores of students after
they had attended a Catholic grade school for eight years.

In 1995, Sander and Anthony C. Krautmann, an associate professor
of economics at DePaul University, examined the effects of Catholic
schooling on high school dropout rates and educational attainment
for all races.36 Paying careful attention to selection
bias and using HS&B data, they found that Catholic schools had
a significant negative effect on the odds of dropping out.
Specifically, Catholic schooling reduced the odds of dropping out
by at least 10 percent compared with public schools.

In 1997, Derek Neal, an associate professor in economics at the
University of Chicago, published a detailed analysis of the effect
of Catholic secondary schooling on high school and college
graduation rates and future wages. To control for selection bias,
Neal used data from the National Catholic Educational Association
(which provides directories with the address and enrollment of
every Catholic school in the United States), the Survey of Churches
and Church Membership (which provides the total number of people in
most religious denominations by county), and the 1980 census to
construct measures of access to Catholic secondary schooling for
each county in the United States.37

Neal merged this information with the National Longitudinal
Survey of Youth and found that African-American and Hispanic
students attending urban Catholic schools were more than twice as
likely to graduate from college as their counterparts in
public schools: 27 percent of black and Hispanic Catholic school
graduates who started college went on to graduate, compared with 11
percent from urban public schools. In addition, the probability
that inner-city students would graduate from high school increased
from 62 percent to at least 88 percent when those students were
placed in a Catholic secondary school. Furthermore, when compared
with their public school counterparts, minority students in urban
Catholic schools can expect roughly 8 percent higher wages in the
future.

The latest study in this area, conducted by University of Oregon
economists David Figlio and Joe Stone,38 attempts to
minimize selection bias as much as possible. Unlike most authors
who used either HS&B data or National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth data from earlier periods, Figlio and Stone used data from
the National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS)39 to
measure differences between public and private schools in the
performance of their students in mathematics and
science.40 They employed a rich set of variables (for
example, race, religious affiliation, and where the parents went to
school) to determine who decides to attend school in the public,
religious, and non-religious private sectors. As a result, their
findings are less likely to be merely symptomatic of the fact that
higher-ability students tend to enroll in private schools.

Figlio and Stone found large, positive differences in test
scores for black and Hispanic students who attended religious
schools, an effect even more pronounced in urban areas. These
positive effects are consistent with Neal's finding that Catholic
schools have a significant positive effect on black and Hispanic
student performance (measured as a reduced risk of dropping out),
but have no substantial effect for the general student population.
Figlio's and Stone's "religious schooling effect" was even stronger
than Neal's findings for blacks and Hispanics in urban areas,
particularly in large central cities.41 They also found
that black and Hispanic students from the 8th to 12th grades gain
the most from religious schooling because religious schools yield
high academic results.42

In addition, Caroline M. Hoxby, a Harvard economist who studied
the effectiveness of school choice programs, found that competition
from Catholic schools increased academic achievement at both public
and Catholic schools.43 Hoxby's findings led her to
state that greater private and Catholic school competitiveness
raises the academic quality of public schools and the high school
graduation rates of public school students. Hoxby also found that
public schools reacted to this competition by increasing teachers'
salaries. Through choice, she concluded, students at both public
and private (including Catholic) schools would increase the amount
of time spent in school by about two years, and their math and
reading test scores would improve by about 10 percent. Consistent
with Neal's findings, Hoxby also noticed a wage increase of 14
percent for private school graduates.

Conclusion

The professional academic literature continues to illustrate
that Catholic schools benefit inner-city children. Catholic schools
offer strict academic and disciplinary guidelines, involve parents,
and have caring teachers and administrators. Children trapped in
inner-city ghettoes succeed in Catholic schools because these
schools offer a quality education in a safe and caring
environment.

In a recent article promoting vouchers for inner-city students,
former Clinton White House adviser William A. Galston44
and the Brookings Institution's Diane Ravitch45argue that "we cannot afford to write off another generation
of urban schoolchildren."46 As they point out, "in many
lower-income urban areas, the traditional ideal of the `common
school' is realized at least as well in Catholic schools as in the
public schools; Catholic schools in the inner cities are typically
not less, but rather more integrated across lines of race and
ethnicity."47

The Community Renewal Act, the District of Columbia Student
Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997, and various school choice
provisions of the Safe and Affordable Schools Act for the first
time would allow low-income inner-city children to receive a
quality education at a reasonable price. If they ignore the
research and personal stories on the benefits of Catholic schools,
federal and state policy makers will be turning their backs on
America's poor children. As syndicated columnist Charles
Krauthammer has observed, the "great crisis in American education
is...at the elementary and high school levels, where thousands of
kids-particularly inner-city minority kids-are getting educations
so rotten that their entire life prospects are blighted." What they
need is "top-flight preparation during kindergarten through grade
12, so that [they] can get into the college of their choice meeting
the same academic standards as their Asian and white
counterparts."48 Catholic schools offer this
"top-flight" education-and at a bargain price.

1 For information on school
choice, see Nina H. Shokraii and Dorothy B. Hanks, "School Choice
Programs: What's Happening in the States," Heritage Foundation
F.Y.I. No. 138, April 21, 1997, and the Heritage school
choice Web site at www.heritage.org/heritage/schools/.

3 William Raspberry, "A
Reluctant Convert to School Choice," The Washington Post,
May 30, 1997.

4 Forthcoming book by Terry
Moe and John Chubb, to be published by the Brookings
Institution.

5 For example, according to a
recent poll, 70.4 percent of blacks with an income of less than
$15,000 a year support school choice. See David A. Bositis, "1997
National Opinion Poll: Children's Issues," Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, June 1997, Table 7.

6 Among the supporters of this
bill are six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which
opposed school choice until Representative Floyd Flake endorsed
it.

7 Similar legislation offered
in 1995 by Representative Steve Gunderson (R-WI) passed the House
with bipartisan support but died in the Senate. The chief opponent
in the Senate was Senator James Jeffords (R-VT), whose home state
is one of only two that have school choice plans in place for
children living in rural neighborhoods without public high schools
nearby.

8 On May 23, 1997, by a vote
of 51 to 49, the Senate passed an amendment to its balanced budget
plan that would allow the use of federal funds to enable victims of
school violence to attend a public, private, or religious school of
choice. Although the voucher language is non-binding, it signifies
support for choice in the Senate. This may be the first time a
school choice plan has "passed" in the Senate.

9 In 1993/1994, tuition at
elementary Catholic schools averaged $1,628, not including
subsidies. See "Voucher Kids: How Private Money Rescues Thousands
of Youngsters from the Public School Monopolists," Forbes,
June 2, 1997. "The average private elementary school tuition in
America is less than $2,500. The average tuition for all private
schools, elementary and secondary, is $3,116, or less than half of
the cost per pupil in the average public school, $6,857." See David
Boaz and R. Morris Barrett, "What Would a School Voucher Buy? The
Real Cost of Private Schools," Cato Institute Briefing Paper
No. 25, March 26, 1996.

12 Susan Chira, "Where
Children Learn How to Learn: Inner-City Pupils in Catholic
Schools," The New York Times, November 20, 1991, p. B8; also
based on interview with Rochelle Griffin, principal, East Catholic
High, June 3, 1997.

13 A. Bryk, V. Lee, and P.
Holland, Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

14 Until a ruling by the
Ohio Court of Appeals on May 1, 1997, striking down the Cleveland
choice experiment, Cleveland had the only school choice program in
place that included religious schools. It was in operation for the
1996/1997 school year.

15 Roy Maynard, "Pro-Choice
(on Education)," World, August 17, 1996.

16 Bryk et al.,
Catholic Schools and the Common Good.

17 Stern, "The Invisible
Miracle of Catholic Schools."

18Ibid.

19 Quoted in Joe Klein, "In
God They Trust," The New Yorker, June 16, 1997.

20 See Peter Rossi and
Andrew M. Greeley, The Education of Catholic Americans
(Chicago, Ill.: Aldine Press, 1966); Andrew M. Greeley, William
McCready, and Kathleen McCourt, Catholic Schools in a Declining
Church (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976); James S. Coleman,
Thomas Hoffer, and Sally Kilgore, High School Achievement:
Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared (New York, N.Y.:
Basic Books, 1982); Andrew M. Greeley, Catholic High Schools and
Minority Students (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books,
1982); James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, Public and Private
Schools: The Impact of Communities (New York, N.Y.: Basic
Books, 1987); Hill et al., High Schools With
Character; Bryk et al., Catholic Schools and the
Common Good; John J. Convey, Catholic Schools Make a
Difference: Twenty-Five Years of Research (Washington, D.C.:
National Catholic Educational Association, 1992); National Center
for Education Statistics, A Profile of the American High School
Senior in 1992 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1995); National Center for Education Statistics, Two
Years Later: Cognitive Gains and School Transitions of NELS:88
Eighth Graders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1995); National Center for Education Statistics, High
School Seniors' Instructional Experiences in Science and
Mathematics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1996); National Center for Education Statistics, National
Education Longitudinal Study Descriptive Summary Report
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996); James S.
Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity Report
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966); and
Derek Neal, "The Effects of Catholic Secondary Schooling on
Educational Achievement," Journal of Labor Economics, Vol.
15, No. 1 (1997), pp. 98-123.

21 Convey, Catholic
Schools Make a Difference.

22 The High School and
Beyond (HS&B) longitudinal study of U.S. high school
seniors and sophomores was conducted for the U.S. Department of
Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement's National
Center for Education Statistics by the National Opinion Research
Center at the University of Chicago. It was designed to complement
an earlier study, the National Longitudinal Study of the High
School Class of 1972 (NLS-72). HS&B studied high school
students of the 1980s and looked at sophomores in addition to
seniors. Adding the sophomores allowed for researchers to study not
only dropout rates, but also changes and processes during high
school. HS&B is considered by some to be a better measure of
student achievements because it looks beyond grades to whether high
school achievement translates into future employment gains or post
graduate work.

23 Bryk et al.,
Catholic Schools and the Common Good.

24 James S. Coleman, "Public
Schools, Private Schools, and the Public Interest," The Public
Interest No. 64 (Summer 1981).

25 Data are available for
independent analysis from the U.S. Department of Education.

26 Denis P. Doyle, "The
Social Consequences of Choice: Why It Matters Where Poor Children
Go to School," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1088,
July 25, 1996. Catholic school sophomores scored 10 percent higher
in science, 12 percent higher in civics, and from 17 percent to 21
percent higher in mathematics, writing, reading, and vocabulary.
Catholic school seniors also consistently outscored public high
school students: 10 percent to 17 percent higher in reading,
mathematics, and vocabulary, and from 3 percent lower to 7 percent
higher on three tests that measure ability more than
achievement.

27 A nonprofit social
science institute.

28 Coleman and Hoffer,
Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of
Communities.

29Ibid.

30Ibid.

31 See Bryk et al.,
Catholic Schools and the Common Good, p. 57; see also
Greeley, Catholic High Schools.

32 Since 1969, the National
Assessment of Educational Progress has conducted assessments of
samples of the country's public and private school students at the
elementary, junior high, and high school levels. It has produced
nearly 200 reports in 11 instructional areas about American
students' academic performance.

33 One widely held theory
holds that children in Catholic schools have more caring parents
because the simple act of placing children in private schools means
they are more engaged in their children's education; thus, there is
a selection bias which leads to higher academic achievement. Using
more sophisticated databases and other research mechanisms, recent
research attempts to control this bias by searching for other
reasons parents place their children in religious schools (for
example, proximity to home, religious beliefs, and racial
composition of the school).

34 William N. Evans and
Robert M. Schwab, "Finishing High School and Starting College: Do
Catholic Schools Make a Difference," The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, November 1995.

38 David Figlio and Joe
Stone, "School Choice and Student Performance: Are Private Schools
Really Better?" (University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on
Poverty, forthcoming in 1997).

39 The NELS is the third
major longitudinal study sponsored by the NCES, after the National
Longitudinal Study of 1972 and HS&B, that surveyed high school
seniors and sophomores (HS&B) through high school, post
secondary education, and work and family formation experiences. The
two previous studies provided measures of educational success and
reasons for academic success and failure. The NELS expands this
knowledge by following children since 8th grade and updating the
information through the 1990s.

40 Researchers usually focus
on math and science because schools keep better records on these
subjects than on reading. Achievement in math and science is also a
better indicator of post-schooling earnings.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) says it's "a great way to start the day for any conservative who wants to get America back on track."

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The Heritage Foundation is the nation’s most broadly supported public policy research institute, with hundreds of thousands of individual, foundation and corporate donors. Heritage, founded in February 1973, has a staff of 275 and an annual expense budget of $82.4 million.

Our mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Read More